Cinderella And The Playboy

Conrad On Hef: `If I Felt He Would Cheat, I Wouldn`t Marry Him`

May 04, 1989|By Lisa Anderson.

NEW YORK — He leaves love notes under her pillow, signed with a heart. She leaves the house with a cellular phone so they can chat while she shops. At 63, he says, ``an angel walked into my life.`` At 26, she says she feels like Cinderella. Countless pedicured tootsies have tried unsuccessfully to squeeze into this particular glass slipper, but on Kimberley Conrad, it was, apparently, the perfect fit. The wedding is on July 1.

Doubtless dashing the daydreams of aging playboys everywhere, Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner is getting married. Relinquishing his 35-year reign as the pajama-clad prince of promiscuity, he has finally found, as Playboy likes to put it, his ``Playmate for a Lifetime,`` and she is a game girl.

But she doesn`t fool around. Conrad, Hefner`s blond betrothed and Playboy`s newly crowned Playmate of the Year, makes it clear that she doesn`t subscribe to the free-wheeling Playboy philosophy that Hefner pioneered just around the time she was born. Nothing short of monogamy, she says, will do for her or for him.

Nothing short of heresy for a generation of Playboy true believers, such words may signal the end of an era, foreshadowed by the closing of the last American Playboy Club last year. But in the age of AIDS they may well be the hallmark of a new era, and Playboy is already positioning Hefner at the cutting edge.

``It will be one of the most startling developments of the century if Hef, whose career has symbolized bachelorhood, comes to represent marriage, American style, in the Nineties,`` pronounces the magazine in its June issue. It may be a bit of breathless overstatement, but it has a point. Since the end of his first and only marriage, in 1959, Hefner, the original swinging single, has played a wide and celebrated field.

``I think he has sown his wild oats. I know he has,`` says Conrad, calmly confident, sitting on a couch in her suite at the Plaza Athenee here. ``If I didn`t feel that he has or if I felt he would cheat on me, then I would not be married to him, because I don`t want that in my relationship. And I know he couldn`t stand the sight of me being with somebody else, either,`` she says, firmly, hands clasped on trim, tanned knees visible between the tops of her white knee socks and the bottom of her white walking shorts.

Diamond studs sparkle on her earlobes, a simple diamond tennis bracelet encircles one slim wrist, and a tennis court-sized engagement ring blazes at the base of one pink-nailed finger. It is, she explains, a 5.5-carat emerald- cut diamond, flanked by two baguettes weighing a total of 2.3 carats.

She doesn`t wear it lightly and, she says, Hefner had to work to get it on her finger. The couple met in May, 1987. A professional model since graduating from high school in Vancouver, B.C., Conrad came to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles to be photographed as the Playmate centerfold for the January, 1988, issue. She recalls thinking Hefner was a ``really, really nice man,`` but ``we were not flirtatious. He wasn`t coming on and I wasn`t coming on. He had a relationship, and I was involved in a relationship. But there was a chemistry. There was something there.``

Hefner then was living with 24-year-old Canadian model Carrie Leigh. Their four-year affair, however, would soon explode in a spectacularly nasty $35-million palimony suit in which Leigh, among other things, charged Hefner with inducing her to have an abortion, promising to support her and pledging to store his sperm so that she could eventually bear his child. Denying her allegations, Hefner countersued, charging her with extortion and ``flagrant`` infidelity. Leigh later dropped her suit after she married another man.

Conrad and Hefner have a prenuptial agreement. ``It was my idea,`` Conrad say, ``Mind you, Hef would probably have brought it up anyway. A man of his wealth has to be protected. And I understand that, because look at all the dirty, filthy court battles,`` she says, clearly with Leigh in mind.

In retrospect, Conrad believes, Leigh, whom she tends to call the ``ex-girlfriend`` to avoid uttering her name, probably sensed the early

``chemistry`` between Hefner and herself. Shortly after Leigh left the mansion, Conrad returned to spend a few days there in early 1988 for another magazine shoot, and, she says, the chemistry was still simmering. Still, she spurned Hefner`s initial advances and even recruited a fellow model to stay with her in her guesthouse room.

``I would not be left alone for a minute. I wasn`t frightened, but I didn`t want to be alone. I didn`t want to put myself in that position. Carrie had just left, and I wasn`t going to be a one-night stand. I wasn`t sure where he was coming from,`` she explains.